Tolerance cannot be measured in terms of degrees of intolerance. I am essentially opposed to burning books even when they incite others to violence. But freedom is either an absolute or it is conditioned on not inciting others to violence. Anything else is rationalized bigotry.

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Thursday, February 28, 2013

Harmony and the Right to Choose

The twentieth century saw more
change than any other time in history.Until
the second half of the 20th Century we lived and died with little
chance of fate intervening to save or prolong what was for many of us, a
largely wretched life. With the exception of the privileged middle and upper
classes life was a struggle. It was miserable, short and unpredictable, made
bearable by superstition and punctuated by exhilarating distractions such as
violence and war, which was perhaps, a welcome change from living a life racked
by disease and starvation.So in the 20th
century we experienced the best and the worst of human behaviour.Mobile death squads and fixed factories of mass
extermination juxtaposed unprecedented opportunities to eliminate human misery
by curing disease and eradicating poverty (and hence hunger).The dystopian nightmare future was our recent
past.

So what is wrong with our present
time?

It
starts with the assumption that we know what we want and of even greater importance
that we know what others want.And
before we endow others with our munificence we make the assumption that their fear
can be conquered even when it is based on an illiberal and reactionary
abhorrence of everything to which we adhere, but more about this later.

I did
not think these thoughts as I travelled on the London Underground last week.
But it did occur to me that the person who pushed in front of me was a symptom
of the disharmony that has failed global man (I use the term loosely to
encompass both sexes).She needed to go
to work. I waited patiently for the commuters to alight from the carriage. I
was dressed casually, not like an office worker. So her superior purpose took
precedence over mine.With this she
justified her need to push in front of us and onto the train before anyone else
had managed to detrain!

In a multicultural society we
celebrate each others cultural eccentricities so our personal peculiarities are
often inextricably linked to, and the reason for, cultural misunderstandings.Too often though, it is the extremists that
impose their world view on the rest of us. Unfortunately, our perception is
time and again, formed by happenstance, rumour and of course, deliberate
disinformation.If a picture tells a
thousand words then even if challenged, the lie is a more effective weapon than
the truth. A poignant photo of a Jewish refugee child (see link) was stolen by the
Palestinian propaganda industry and rebranded. What an inspired, cynical misuse
of history.The victim’s past becomes
the means by which her memory and then she, is obliterated.

Propaganda can both offend and
also be an effective means of recruitment. One such example occurs in the UK
every year on Armistice Day (also known as Remembrance Day). It is commemorated
as a time to remember the dead of war.Poppies,
as such, are an international symbol of that remembrance.Muslim extremists burn poppies to protest the
West’s oppression of Muslims. For many
people, the act of burning poppies, along with anti-Infidel (Crusader) signage
taints all Muslims even though it should not.But while all Muslims and all those on the political Left are not rabid
cultural bullies their overwhelming silence (or any excuses that they make) for
an act so egregious that it offends almost everyone, can only be interpreted as
tacit agreement by the mainstream for the fringe.

And the bully will defend an act
of extremism and demand that we support them in demonstration of our fealty to
the ideals they profess even when they contradict everything we believe in.It is the new intellectual terrorism so
adroitly practiced by the McCarthyist practitioners of the Red-green-brown alliance.

It was never the intent of multiculturalism
as a national policy that it be predicated on equal but separate
development.Distinct identities, interwoven
but based on shared responsibilities would tolerate dissent but maintain
national unity based on founding principles. It is the rejection of both founding
principles and a common attachment to history that has brought multiculturalism
into disrepute.

We arrived at this failure of association because we permitted the bully to
control the dialogue, to manipulate the storyline and in a world of
unprecedented opportunity we lost the path to the future by assuming that if we
allowed poisoned flowers to blossom they would eventually lose their
potency.They haven’t, instead their
toxic malevolence has spread across the globe.

The reason I bring this up is
that we have permitted too many loopholes in the law, too many opportunities
for the hustler to profit (and not just from the weak and the stupid), and too
many unscrupulous and benighted policies to be enacted in the subjective name
of fairness, progress and better government.In spite of an insupportable burden of ever-increasing regulation the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries has been witness, for far too long, to an
era of laissez faire doctrine governing society.

Non-interference, especially in
individual conduct, has elevated the individual above the group, to the status
of a potentate.It isn’t simply the
well-dressed office worker pushing to get onto the uncrowded train.It is the way we are constantly being told
what to do and what not to do; what to think and what to believe in.Our aggression is encouraged and channelled,
for the sole satisfaction of the id, for the benefit of the ‘I’.The person who refuses to wait, or who
permits their children to sit while adults stand are all concerned with the
‘me’ to the exclusion of ‘us’.First and
foremost, their lives revolve around what society owes them.At a time in history when we should all be
able to celebrate our freedom from fear, hunger, violence and poverty we are
instead contemptuous of our fellow man as if we remain in competition with them
for our very survival.In our relentless
drive to compete – whether for money or for souls, society has lost sight of
our humanity, and part of that humanity is our purpose.

In Iraq, in the decade since the
invasion, the US alone has spent almost one trillion dollars in propping up this
homicidal and racist entity; and on civilian projects alone, since 2001, one
hundred and twenty billion dollars has been spent in Afghanistan.If other countries desire to replicate our
way of life then they will eventually accede to doing so, without our
interference. The best example I can cite is the story of China. By area, China is the third largest country
in the world with the largest population. It has a recorded history that is as
old as any nation. It has absorbed many influences – always choosing only that
which it considered complementary to its own civilisation.Nations that are not conquered, even some
that are, eventually pick and choose what suites them best.

There are many people in the
world who fear our permissive, Western society of free association and
perceived lack of restraint.The Osama
bin-Laden’s of this world grew up immersed in immense material wealth. Because
of this they were able to reject and use the power their wealth gave them to
attack what they feared. And what they fear is what they see every day, on
their TV screens, as they walk along the street and in their newspapers.There is nothing that we can say (or do) that
will convince them of our intrinsic value as human beings. We can only defeat
them if we marginalise them and if we respond to their incoherent morality by
highlighting their ethical contradictions, at every opportunity, publicly.

When we attempt to govern the
ungovernable by throwing money at them we earn not respect for our ways but contempt.
To protect our societies from the fall-out of failed nations such as Somalia and Afghanistan
and nearly failed nations such as Pakistan, we should boycott them,
ban all international interaction with them and those that support them should
also be excluded. It is not a form of colonial enterprise to let a nation go
its own way if it wants our resources but not our material or spiritual ‘contamination.’It is not isolationist to want to protect
ones’ society from corrupt influences because the very word ‘corrupt’ is
subjective and all of human history has been formed by the subjective decisions
of individuals within groups that make up societies.It is our choices that define not just us
but our respective civilisations.